Making the most of your clinical years

An abrupt step up from the early years of medical school

By:
Henry Murphy

You’ve been bored and frustrated through your early years of medical school. You feel that everything will fall into place as soon as you set foot inside a hospital. It can therefore be a shock when you finally hit the wards and discover that the experience is an anticlimax. Your supervisors are not expecting you, they do not know what to do with you, and they do not even trust you to take a history from a patient. You might be bored and at a loss, embarrassed to ask your seniors for more structured teaching. “After being taught in a structured way throughout the first two years of medical school, being thrown onto the ward made me wonder how I was going to learn anything,” said Daniella Carter, a fifth year medical student at the Peninsula Medical School.